Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Cezanne’s Doubt” (1945), devoted primarily to the painter Paul Cezanne, engages with Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci, A Memory of His Childhood (1910) to articulate his distinctive view of the relation between a painter’s life and work. This paper examines how Merleau-Ponty incorporates psychoanalytic ideas into his aesthetic theory around the time of “Cézanne’s Doubt”, based on the descriptions of “Cézanne’s Doubt”. The paper focuses on a passage discussing Freud’s text, that abruptly appears in the discussion of Cézanne and whose theoretical function is not immediately obvious. This analysis will help recontextualize the art theory in “Cézanne’s Doubt” within the history of art-theoretical engagement with psychoanalysis, thereby complementing previous studies that have focused on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology or his major work Phenomenology of Perception (1945). This paper first outlines the conception of sexuality as a non-determining atmosphere discovered retrospectively within activity, and his account of motivational relations, as developed in Phenomenology of Perception. The paper then turns to the interpretation of Freud’s text in “Cézanne’s Doubt” and argues Merleau-Ponty’s claim that painters resume their own lives through the act of painting, while psychoanal

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This paper aims to reveal the theoretical continuity connecting Goodman’s ontology in The Structure of Appearance (1977) and his symbol theory in Languages of Art (1968) and Ways of Worldmaking (1978) with the concept of exemplification as its focus. While exemplification is central to Goodman’s aesthetics, the logical basis for how a symbol possesses the qualities or properties it refers to remains under-explained in his later works. By revisiting the methodology of mereology (part-whole logic) established in The Structure of Appearance, this paper provides a logical foundation for the concept of exemplification. This paper argues that in Goodman’s constructivist system, an object possessing a quality or property means that the quality or property is a logical part of that object. Consequently, exemplification is understood as a symbol function that manifests these intrinsic parts. It proves that the discussion of quality and qualification in his early constructivist system grounds the diverse forms of artistic exemplification. This approach ultimately interprets Goodman’s philosophy as a unified process of knowledge constitution that develops

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This paper defends aesthetic quasi-realism as a way of resolving the tension between autonomy and normativity in aesthetic judgement. Robert Hopkins criticizes quasi realism on the grounds that it vindicates fault-allocating arguments and thereby undermines the autonomy of aesthetic judgement. In response, this paper seeks to reconcile autonomy and normativity by focusing on aesthetic dispute and by explicating normativity in terms of “readiness”. Here, “readiness” refers to a dispositional willingness to have one’s aesthetic judgement subjected to communal scrutiny. I further argue that this account of aesthetic quasi-realism explains the varying degrees of normativity that appear across aesthetic contexts, from art criticism to everyday preferences.

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This paper explores the ethics of the arranger in ikebana. While Florence Burgat (2020) argues that plants, unlike animals, are not proper objects of ethical care, Hans Jonas (1989 [1979]) emphasizes responsibility toward the vulnerable. Drawing on these perspectives, this paper contends that the ethical issue in ikebana lies not in cutting plants from their roots but in the arranger’s partial assumption of responsibility when the life of a cut flower could instead be entrusted to another person. Because the pursuit of beauty or form in ikebana presupposes the continued life of the flower, arrangers must choose between simply placing flowers in water—thus enabling the transfer of responsibility—or engaging in aesthetic formation. Once a work has been produced, the arranger must remove the flowers from the vase if they are to be absent, since the work physically rejects the invasion of others. Failing to pass on the flower’s life in such situations constitutes irresponsibility. Following Washida Kiyokazu (2024), an arrangement can be completed only when the arranger assumes responsibility for the flower’s life within a mode of ownership separated from free disposal. Such responsibility underlies ikebana as an ethical practice

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Ishiuchi Miyako’s Chromosome XY (1991-95), a series of photographs that captured male naked bodies, has received scant attention compared to other works by the artist. This paper aims to re-evaluate the series by examining it as the starting point for the “physicality” and the “intimacy” of her work. In Chromosome XY, Ishiuchi experimented with new styles of shooting, including super close-ups and various shooting distances, which led to the “physicality” of her later work. After producing the series, Ishiuchi began using a camera as a tool to bridge the distance between her and her subjects, and the shift became a catalyst for “intimacy” in her work. These “physicality” and “intimacy” underpin the distinctive capacity of Ishiuchi’s work to open experiential contexts that are otherwise difficult to share beyond those directly involved. Despite the importance of Chromosome XY, it has not been understood adequately because it violated a taboo in the Japanese photography world by presenting photographs of male naked bodies taken by a woman artist. I argue that the series marks a turning point in Ishiuchi’s career while also constituting a feminist achievement that exposes the social constraints regarding the representation of male bodies.

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Santiago Sierra, a Spanish contemporary artist born in 1966, collaborated with luxury brand Balenciaga to produce a mud installation as the stage for the brand’s summer 2023 collection show. However, compared to past practices focused on the exploitation of individual labor, this project appeared to represent an ugly way connected with the global multinational corporations he had long denounced. Consequently, his solo exhibition and works Los Embarrados at Labor Gallery in Mexico City, which exhibited these archives, was criticized as “uninteresting souvenirs.” Against this reception, this paper argues that Sierra strategically problematized experiential disparity arising between the collection show and gallery audiences through exhibiting “uninteresting souvenirs”. This paper focuses on the presence of invited celebrities and examine the work of Balenciaga’s creative director, Demna Gvasalia. Drawing on Nancy Fraser’s theory, the analyze reveals how Balenciaga’s collection shows frame celebrities as economically and culturally privileged subjects, exploiting the very structure of disparity as a strategic mechanism of brand value production. Sierra’s practice is not simply an advertising strategy for a luxury brand. The subsequently released “uninteresting souvenirs” can be interpreted as preserving a critical distance from the very structural conditions generating disparities among participants in the fashion industry.

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This paper examines the environmental graphics of Takenobu Igarashi (1944- 2025), focusing on their formal characteristics and relationship to urban experience. It analyzes Shibuya PARCO PART 3 (1981) and Suntory Hall (1986), where Igarashi worked across urban elements such as logotypes, symbols, signage, supergraphics, benches, and monuments. The first chapter considers the continuity between three-dimensional letterforms represented on flat media through axonometric projection and their realization as “alphabet sculptures,” revealing the formal foundation of Igarashi’s design. The second chapter, focusing on Shibuya PARCO PART 3, demonstrates how various urban “stage settings” function as media conveying messages from PARCO and discusses how Igarashi’s methodology of “visual transformation” extends the logotype and the chart across their settings. The third chapter examines Suntory Hall, analyzing the significance of the plaza within Mori Building’s Ark Hills redevelopment and focusing on Igarashi’s monument placed there. Although it appears as neutral public art, the monument originates from a symbol and functions as advertising, communicating corporate messages to passersby. Igarashi’s environmental graphics thus establish a new mode of urban experience. In this mode, a single graphic extends across architectural and urban elements, and corporate messages are transmitted repeatedly through a network of media embedded in the city.

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In this paper, I present an aesthetic characterization of a specific type of actions within games—actions centered on the use of ‘skill’ (skill game acts). Researchers in Game Studies—a field specializing in the study of games and video games—include Marie Flanagan (Flanagan 2013), who argues that games are valuable insofar as they can serve as a form of conceptual art offering social critique, and Ian Bogost (Bogost 2010), who states that games can be an effective means of making a claim; by proving that games and video games possess artistic value rather than being mere entertainment, they have championed the field. On the other hand, C. T. Nguyen demonstrates that games can be characterized by the fact that aesthetic qualities reside in the actions perceived by the actor themselves, and in agency itself, and defends this by presenting the ‘three harmonies of gameplay’—the harmony of solution, the harmony of action, the harmony of capacity. Bearing the above in mind, this paper focuses on a specific type of game within the broader category of games, those in which the demonstration of player ‘skill’ is particularly important—and undertakes an aesthetic characterization of the actions within such games. In presenting this characterization, we refer to Jesper Juul’s (2005) six characteristics of games, placing particular emphasis on the second characteristic— that games possess ‘variable, quantifiable outcomes’—and the third characteristic—the ‘valorization of outcomes. This is because these characteristics mean that game actions possess the property of having clearly directed effects, and I think that this brings about a unique quality of experience. In Section 1 below, I derive the concept of ‘skill game act’ from Jesper Juul’s explanation of ‘games of skill’ and elaborate on the experiential qualities it possesses through a phenomenological explanation based on actual gameplay. In Section 2, drawing on Nguyen’s aesthetic characterization of games and his explanation of ‘process art’, I demonstrate that game action, as perceived from the agent’s perspective’, can serve as a vehicle for aesthetic qualities. In Section 3, I provide an overview of Jesper Juul’s characterization of games and identify two key elements from it. In Section 4, building upon Juul’s characterization of skilled game play, we present an explanation from two perspectives: ‘the salience of act’, comprising ‘automatic attribution of value’ and ‘clarity of causality’, and ‘the abstraction of act’.

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